


The Fall of Arcadia and Afterwards

by MumblingSage



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005), Doctor Who: Eighth Doctor Adventures - Various Authors
Genre: Fix-It, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Time War, continuity gorn, continuity porn, gen but open to slashy readings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-05
Updated: 2012-03-05
Packaged: 2017-11-01 12:56:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/357038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MumblingSage/pseuds/MumblingSage
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which I try to fit all my headcanons about Fitz Kreiner’s fate into a single (semi-)coherent story. There’s no required reading, although some knowledge of Year of Intelligent Tigers wouldn’t hurt.</p><p>Warnings: angst, playing with timey-wimey metaphysics, distinct lack of Britpicking</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Fall of Arcadia and Afterwards

_I was there at the fall of Arcadia. Someday, I might even come to terms with that._

Arcadia is a city, or a fortress, or a temple flying miles above the featureless plain of a nameless planet drifting in a patch of space-time that folds and unfolds relative to the ordinary universe like a pair of wings.

There’s a fascinating story of how it got that way, but the Doctor can’t quite remember all the details (nor can he shake the feeling that some of them have gone and changed on him when he wasn’t looking). He opens his mouth to apologize for this, in case Fitz is disappointed, but Fitz has already wandered down a vault like corridor after one of the more compelling female denizens. Hard to hear over the echo of her beating silver-feathered pinions, but he may have just called her a bird more or less to her face. Luckily, there are no avians in Arcadia, so she won’t recognize the horrible pun.

He looks back over his shoulder, and the Doctor waves forgivingly. No doubt he’s off to do something important. In the meantime, the Doctor—

The Doctor has nothing to do except wait.

An unexpected portion of the Time War is spent waiting—for orders, for reports, for battle. Couldn’t someone do something to erase all these dull minutes? Except the stress caused by the removal of all these empty moments would be too much for Time to handle, probably. He's already made Her cough up entire worlds, and swallow might-have-been histories until She choked. They all had.

That’s why the Doctor hates having nothing to do. He starts to remember.

He goes back to whistling the familiar six-note tune. Fitz had heard him the other night and taught him the words to the song—his song, as it turned out. Fitz’s song, that is, though the Doctor’s too in a way.

He’s had songs written about him before, but never one that stuck with the Doctor like this. He’s glad of it. It doesn’t cover the thunder of explosions in the ship-city beneath him, the screech of metal giving way at someone else’s station, the firing of exotic weaponry in yet another part—but it helps. There have been days when the music is all that keeps him from wishing to go deaf.

The Doctor lost his Stradivarius ages ago, and hasn’t even had time to miss it. No time to play Mozart, Saint-Saëns, Beethoven, Puccini. No time at all in a war full to the gills with it, including wasted time like this—

At a younger, more undisciplined stage of this regeneration he may have run for the TARDIS now to find his violin to play these moments out. But of course he’s learned discipline since then (see, he isn’t even running to the rescue of the people dying in the blasts below; the Daleks can’t realize the Doctor, the Oncoming Storm, is aboard Arcadia until the last tripwire of the plan has been snapped by their clumsy metal bodies—a figurative tripwire, that is. Mostly.) Now he’s satisfied with just humming these six notes.

Another explosion, closer. Tension coils in his body as he subconsciously prepares to spring into action. One of Arcadia’s warriors flies past him, not sparing a glance for this strange wingless ally who may become the hero of yet another world before the day is out.

The sound of shrieking metal and screaming men and women suggest much of Arcadia beyond a bend not far down the corridor to his right is no longer there. The Doctor’s mind is already in motion, calculating how this might change his plans (no time to run to help, to break discipline now). He’ll have to find a different lift, for one thing, to carry him down to the fusion engines when—

A very strange noise comes from the far end of the corridor. Footsteps here in this city of wings. Stumbling footsteps. Labored breathing. And a familiar voice, gasping “Doctor…”

He flies down the corridor almost as if he has wings of his own, and he catches Fitz before he hits the floor. His hands are immediately wet with red, hot human blood. His fingers brush a shard of metal embedded in flesh, and Fitz groans.

“You were caught in the explosion just now,” the Doctor says, mouth catching up with his thoughts.

“That’s exactly what I suspected.” Fitz grins with bloodied teeth. Maybe he’s bitten his tongue. The Doctor shifts his grip to avoid putting pressure on the pieces of Arcadian alloys piercing his skin. But he should be putting pressure somewhere, trying to stop the bleeding, and—

But he just can’t fool himself this time.

Maybe it’s the situation that brings it home to him. The Doctor fights a sense of déjà vu, this one not brought on by some Time War incursion. Not from this war in time, at least. Perhaps those events never really happened at this point, but still he remembers them. Remembers this is not the first time he has held a dying Fitz Kreiner in his arms.

“Figured I should…find my Doctor.” Fitz is still smiling, and almost laughs until a sharp agony in his lungs seems to convince him it’s not a good idea.

The Doctor tries to return the smile. “Yes, of course. I’ll just…” He presses somewhere where it doesn’t seem to cause too much pain, hoping this looks like it’s helping. “And I’ll find a fay’eilla”—the healers of Arcadia, with an even closer resemblance to angels than most of its inhabitants—“just hold on. Stay with me.”

“—not what I meant.” Fitz coughs, bringing up more blood.

The Doctor wants to make it go away, and the tension is still coiled inside him waiting to be released. He’ll think of something clever, he’ll make Time take back this turn of the cards—not literally, of course; he’s the Doctor, he rarely has to turn the hourglass upside down to save someone. He’ll just find the solution lying around, or fix one together out of the wire hanger and shriveled apple core in his pockets, or…

“I can’t,” he says quietly. Not because he’s ready to accept the truth, but because someone who’s been through as much as Fitz has deserves to hear it. The Doctor’s mind still jumps from possibility to possibility, looking for the right one, even though he knows it doesn’t exist. “I’m sorry, I don’t—”

“Yeah, I know.” Fitz shifts in his arms, even though every motion must bring agony. He raises one of his hands, grasps the Doctor’s shoulder. As if trying to return the embrace. “Didn’t think you could make me better. ‘m not that stupid.”

“Is now the best time to be so cynical?” the Doctor reprimands him—half-sharply, half-playfully. Both halves are completely sincere. It’s a talent of his, that splitting.

Part of him, a tiny corner, is still adjusting his plan to snatch Arcadia from the jaws of defeat.

Fitz’s jaw clamps tight, holding back a groan after he tries to shrug and his failing, hurting body reminds him not to move. “I just meant,” he said, “I don’t expect you to…make me better. Just…make…it better. For me.”

“It?”

Gray eyes pin his gaze, the brightness and hard clarity in them not coming from cynicism at all. Not from hope, either. Something beyond hope.

“I just wanted to die close to you.” He adds, still able to joke, to be so insincere, “Is that too much to ask?”

“No no no no.” The Doctor holds him tighter, supporting his shoulders, rocking absently as if helping a child to sleep. “That’s not too much. Of course not. It—”

Oh, shut up, he thinks to himself. Not cynically. No, it’s just that he’s found something better to do with his lips than babble.

First he presses them tenderly to Fitz’s forehead, where chill sweat has left his skin almost as cool as a Gallifreyan’s. His spilling blood is still warm, though. And the Doctor begins to hum.

Six notes, in a tune that never grows old. Truly Timeless, he thinks, but doesn’t say aloud. They’re past the point for puns now.

Fitz turns his head, pressing his face to the Doctor’s jacket, so that his last breaths smell of sandalwood rather than the sour stench of burning alloy or his own blood. Better. His breathing hitches, then stops. His eyes are closed. Is his mind peaceful, in these last moments? Or is it running like the Doctor’s, trying to find a way to save him, fruitless as a marathon run on a treadmill? The six notes can only occupy so much of his mind—though the space they do take up is larger than he grants to most things.

The woman Fitz had been befriending only the hour before lies across the threshold at the end of the corridor. The sliding doors have slammed on her right wing, the pinion holding them open just wide enough for a slender man to crawl through from the wreckage on the other side. Shrapnel had passed through her throat, killing her quickly. Her left wing is spread out on the floor, white down thicker than Christmas snow, large enough to cradle a grown human being. Perhaps she meant to hold someone there. If she’d had the time.

The Doctor shuts her azure eyes, then carries Fitz’s body across the corridor to lay it in her offered embrace. He doesn’t think either of them would have minded.

Then he sets forth to try to save Arcadia. With half the city blown to oblivion just from the preliminary attack, it seems a hopeless cause, but of course he makes the attempt anyway.

Arcadia falls, plummeting to the plain below where it lands with a blossom of fusion fire. The Doctor escapes before then, of course. He watches the impact on a scanner in the TARDIS and thinks of the funeral customs of a thousand peoples from the An-jurok to the Vikings. He concludes that none of the customs are really much good.

A dark leather jacket is draped over the console. Moving carefully around it, he sets the coordinates for another battle in this endless, timeless war, trying to hum six notes until his voice breaks.

#

He doesn’t carry that particular tune again for a long time.

#

Years later, he finds himself at a so-called Time Traveller’s Convention trying, predictably, to avert a disaster brought on by several obvious violations of the Laws of Time. He catches a glimpse of the name tag of one of the few people remaining level-headed enough to help him herd convention-goers to a safer portion of the gathering space, one without a confused voritisaur rampaging through it.

He’s distracted, maybe he misreads.

But he has a talent for thinking along multiple lines at once; he isn’t that distracted.

The nametag really does seem to read Fitz Fortune—Event Volunteer.

While helping one of the exhibitors set up what the talented young person called a ‘Mobius Engine’ to do the trick that saves all their lives and then conveniently self-destruct before causing further damage to the continuum, he catches another glimpse of the man, observing from a safe(-ish) distance with his arms folded and a small smile on his face. The woman standing beside him looks vaguely familiar, and although her name tag reads nothing like Beatrice MacMillan, that doesn’t prove much.

Time, of course, can be rewritten. And it is, during Time Wars. But the rewritten balance can be precarious, easily upset, especially if someone draws attention to the paradox. So the Doctor tells himself, giving his reasons for not going after the couple as they walk away as the smoke (figurative, although there is a quantity of fine dawn-orange dust) clears. Of course, his face has changed several times over, so they have no reason to recognize him. Multiple name tags at this convention designated a John Smith, and the number of eccentrics trying to save the day was certainly above usual.

Still.

Time can be rewritten, only to snap back. The Doctor still remembers the fall of Arcadia; somewhere, if only in his own mind, it still happened.

He returns to the TARDIS and finds his Stradivarius. Then he de- and rematerializes about half a kilometer away (previously the old girl had refused to park closer to the carnival funhouse the convention had made of the Time Vortex, but now she seems to be making a special effort to set down just right), outside the wing of the hotel where the convention organizers are staying. He steps to the sidewalk beneath the windows, and in the still silence following the growl of the TARDIS’s reappearance, he plays six notes, rising and falling, over and over again, and he sings the words he’d only heard once but remembers perfectly.

This regeneration isn’t as nimble with the fingering as he has been, and his voice gets a little squeaky at times (especially times of great emotion), but soon he has heads poking out of windows, fingers tapping, a few more musical individuals joining in. Half of the Doctor is listening for one voice in particular. The other half concentrates only on the song.

A guitar joins in the second time through the refrain, echoing from one of the rooms. The Doctor smiles and plays until his uncallused fingers nearly bleed. When he runs out of verses he falls silent, almost expecting to hear someone sing new ones.

Nobody does, but then, Fitz claimed it had been a very difficult song to write. Taken him years. Improvisation was always more the Doctor’s thing.

He finishes playing with a flourish, and the evening falls silent again. He bows to his audience, then strides back to the police box in the parking lot. The Doctor unlocks and opens the door slowly, as if waiting for someone to join him.

Nobody does. It’s just as well, perhaps. He’s been caught up in other things since then, with different people (all of them brilliant) and he’s learned the importance of heading separate ways when the time came.

After all, he reflects as he presses a stubborn typewriter key, the host of a Time Traveller’s Convention might well have his own ways of getting around. Not classier than a dimensionally transcendent police box, but he had seen some interesting things while he shadowed that Torchwood agent’s itinerary. Particularly the ones that looked homemade.

Or perhaps this convention, and everyone attending it, will never have happened by tomorrow.

The scanner shows windows being closed up again at the end of his impromptu concert. One lingers—a pale, thin hand reaches out, waving.

The Doctor waves back as he throws the materialization switch.

The TARDIS sings a siren song of her own, rasping joyfully as she dives once more into all the mysteries of the universe.


End file.
